"Spain last night killed a controversial anti-P2P bill that would have made it easier to shut down websites that link to infringing content. The move was a blow to the ruling Socialist government, but it may be of even bigger concern to the US, which pushed, threatened, and cajoled Spain to clamp down on downloading. And Wikileaks can take a share of the credit for the defeat."

Do these people have some reasoning capacity? Why vote for a law if you are opposed to its contents and deem it ineffective?

Well, my mother works at my town's municipal council, and she could have given me the explanation of this mystery... To some extent.

At the first municipal council after the municipal elections, one of the member of the electoral majority stood and claimed that she couldn't stay there and had to leave. She explained that after the elections, her political party (which happened to be the UMP) briefed her, telling her that she had to approve anything the mayor proposes. She said that doing this was against her vision of democracy, and that she was afraid she had to leave because of that.

Obviously, we don't know the whole story, because if it was only that, she could have stayed, do what she thinks is right, and ignore this anti-democratic order. After all, they have trusted her enough to give her this place, so they have to face the consequences. Either she was particularly obedient by nature or there are some things happening behind the scene which we don't know, to make sure that people in a party follow their leader or leave.

This might explain why people like this deputy let laws which they know will be ineffective pass : they just blindly follow their leader, as they have been told to.